My wife and I moved to Hamilton, MT where that lab is located after searching around for the best mountain town to work remotely from.
It's a unique little town with amazing local mountains and rivers, some good restaurants and breweries and not too many tourists. The lab brings in educated young people including many climbers and skiers.
People joke that they government will let you live somewhere this awesome if you're willing to work on ebola.
In reality the lab was founded originally to study a tick born illness first observed in the area in the early 1900's and was eventually chosen as a BSL-4 site do in part to its isolated location and the fact that all access to the valley can be cut off by blocking a relatively few number of roads.
What are your days like? Sounds like an amazing job, and Montana is beautiful. Would you stay there, or do you plan to move back to somewhere busier later in life?
Honestly not much changed work wise except that instead of commuting i can go for a trail run or quick ski tour or head to the local bouldering area. I was already on a distributed team with most meetings done via video call and heavy use of issue trackers and chat for communication.
I lived in a big city for 10+ years and can't see going back. I've actually changed jobs once since we moved here and we plan to stay.
To be clear I don't work for RML. I just live here and work remotely for another company (originally for another bio research institution but that just confuses things.)
I suspect RML is one of the oldest and also one of the most active in areas like ebola research. Many of the newer ones seem to be focused on emerging diseases and bioterrorism and less on the existing really nasty diseases.
I've worked in a BSL-3 lab, not BSL-4. It's pretty similar. Almost identical danger to the individuals in the lab, but different level of danger to the surrounding community...
So if I screw up, I might die, but you'll be safe. In BSL-4, everyone might die. (At least that's roughly the reasoning behind the categorization of pathogens.)
> You can't do anything else other than what you're doing at that moment. It's kind of a nice mode to be in while you're working. And it's very quiet. Because you're on that air hose that blows air into your suit continuously, you can't talk to anyone unless you're wearing a radio. So, you're in your own little bubble doing your own thing.
This really is one of the best parts of the work. At certain times of the day / week, you literally had no way to contact anyone, and no one could contact you.
"...working at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana. The 450-person facility, which is part of the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is nestled in a town of 4,000.
It's surrounded by mountains and national forests. Only one road passes through."
There's a small HEPA filter on the suit itself, downstream of the air hose connection, that filters out whatever may be on the hose connection.
You can go without a connection for several minutes easily.
The article also unusually describes "thinking about keeping the suit under positive pressure." The vents in the suit have one-way valves, so it really isn't something you need to think about.
That, I would also like to know. There must be a safety procedure in that kind of event. I imagine they would just detach and leave the lab. Suits are probably made in a way that no air can leave from the air plug
Sounds unimaginably scary. Yet folks work in foundaries; climb telephone poles all day; cut down trees; fight forest fires; wash windows on the 100th floor. Dead is dead I guess, and you can get used to anything.
It's a unique little town with amazing local mountains and rivers, some good restaurants and breweries and not too many tourists. The lab brings in educated young people including many climbers and skiers.
People joke that they government will let you live somewhere this awesome if you're willing to work on ebola.
In reality the lab was founded originally to study a tick born illness first observed in the area in the early 1900's and was eventually chosen as a BSL-4 site do in part to its isolated location and the fact that all access to the valley can be cut off by blocking a relatively few number of roads.